Among car enthusiasts, Chicago native Dan Schnitta is a rarity. “I don’t know how it worked out like this,” he says, “but I have fun all of the time.” As far as I can tell, it’s true. I want to be Dan.

Schnitta, 65, lives above his bar, the GingerMan Tavern, a block north of Wrigley Field. Scenes from the movie The Color of Money were shot in the bar’s adjoining pool room. [See last month’s comparo, “The Real Color of Money.”] He owns about 15 cars, which he stores at the road course he built in 1995, GingerMan Raceway. When he’s at the track, he lives in South Haven, Michigan, on the shores of Lake Michigan. He commutes between the track and the tavern, selecting “whatever car feels right that day but usually the BMW M3 or the Mazda RX-8.” And when the weather goes south, so does he, fleeing to his coastal home in Costa Rica.

In college, Schnitta saw a Porsche 356C in a car magazine. “My dream was to go to Stuttgart to buy that car,” he recalls. “So, in 1965, a friend and I got in a ’41 Mercury, and we found a liquor store, bought a bottle of whiskey, drank it, and puked on the car. It was two degrees in Chicago. We headed toward New Orleans, and the puke didn’t thaw until Kentucky.”

In New Orleans, the pair boarded a freighter bound for Le Havre, France, “except the captain didn’t tell us we were going to Central America first,” he recalls. “That took three months. I was the galley boy. But once I got to Europe, I found work doing laundry for U.S. soldiers in Dachau. It was fun. The soldiers gave me free beer. Then I drove to Nice and found a church with a sign that said, ‘Free Cookies’—wow, a free meal, so in I went. The priest hired me as a handyman, then one day told me I was riding my motorcycle too fast and drinking too much. He said, ‘You might want to move on.’ ”

Sans 356C, Schnitta returned to the U.S., arriving in Philly in 1966. “In a bookstore, there was an ad for the ‘unexpurgated edition of The Ginger Man, by J.P. Donleavy.’ It sounded racy. I read it all through the night on the bus headed back to Chicago. And there was this passage, when Sebastian Dangerfield is trying to seduce Lilly, and he says to her, ‘What’s a piece of arse between friends...?’ And I thought, ‘Wow, he’s me. That’s me.’ ”

Once home, Schnitta applied to the Peace Corps but was rejected as “too much of a bounder,” so he went into real estate. “A guy told me bars were good investments. So I found one [in 1975], a flat-iron building that had been owned by a woman selling everything from prostitutes to heroin. When I bought it, the cops told me to wait a year before reopening, to get rid of the ‘children of the night.’ They said, ‘We don’t even want you to smile in there.’ The bar was next to the Metro Theatre, and I thought, ‘Beautiful actresses will come into my place!’ Some did, but mostly guys—Leonard Nimoy, John Malkovich, Gary Sinise. Nowadays, I have an artsy and reflective clientele. When they come in all revved up and tipsy after a ballgame, I put on classical music. Calms them right down.”

Still, the children of the night sometimes return, with dire consequences. “A guy went into the men’s room and shot his head off. Business wasn’t so good that evening. Later in the week, I told a drunk he couldn’t come in. He jammed his hand through the front window, cut his arteries, almost bled to death. The cops arrived and said, ‘Schnitta, you gotta cut this shit out.’ I said, ‘I didn’t let him in.’ The cop said, ‘Yeah, well, that’s two in one week.’

“I installed big windows so the cops could see what was going on inside. They liked that.”

After the movie was released in 1986, Schnitta’s bar business boomed, and he began buying cars, initially a BMW 320i built by Steve Dinan for SCCA racing. “Before my first real race at Elkhart Lake, my mom said, ‘Listen, take it easy, okay?’ I said, ‘I think I’ll go as fast as I possibly can.’ ”

Among Schnitta’s current collection, his favorites include an ’02 Honda S2000; a ’67 Jag XKE; an ’06 Lotus Elise; an ’87 Lotus Esprit; a ’68 Corvette GT1 racer; a ’94 Mazda RX-7 and an ’05 RX-8; an ’06 Nissan 350Z; an ’05 Porsche Boxster S; a ’57 MGA; a ’98 Formula Mazda; a ’70 Porsche 911 RS that Schnitta painted French pink (“I love that car, they’ll bury me in that car”); two BMW M3s—an ’02 and an ’08 (“I loaned the first one to my daughter, who never gave it back, so now I have two”); a ’97 Formula Ford; a ’71 Porsche 911 Targa; and, in Costa Rica, a much-loved ’06 Toyota Terios (“top speed around 65 mph”).

Right now, Schnitta is consumed by a 1770-foot extension to his racetrack. He’s also adding new curbing and flagging stations so the course can be run counterclockwise. “You could race both directions on the same weekend!” he gushes. “I’m 65 years old, and it suddenly occurred to me to go backward. I think it’s a good sign. Or maybe something’s really wrong with me. Could be. You know, SCCA marshals have black-flagged me twice on my own track. They said I was screwing around. I said, ‘I’m just ­having fun.’ "